EDM 173 - Something from Memory

It's been almost 30 years since I've seen the backyard of the home where I was a child, so this is REALLY drawn from memory--an old, probably slightly faulty, memory. I grew up in a modest home in northern Ohio. I have many memories of the small yard.

Clockwise from the upper right: the large, carpenter-ant-infested oak tree that was struck by lightning and fell toward the house and pounded the small crab apple tree into the ground several feet but did no damage to the house; the snowball bush (I'm sure that's not the technical name, but I'm botanically challenged); the rail fence that my brother Mark tried to jump over when he was about 12, resulting in a compound fracture of his forearm and a harrowing drive to the emergency room (my mom at the wheel); my favorite bush, a purple lilac, which yielded many gifts of flowers for our school teachers; the ill-fated crab apple tree, from which we tried to make juice one summer (we might or might not have used a 5-lb. bag of sugar and might still have thrown the whole batch away); the brick chimney, around which many Easter eggs were hidden; a generic tree (What do I know? It had no fruit to juice, so....); the rock patio, meticulously laid by my dad one summer; the amazing split-trunk oak tree, around which many family pictures were taken; and lastly, the row of bushes under which I created many little "villages" from sticks and leaves and my brother's Matchbox cars (Shhh! He still doesn't know!)

This was a really fun project. I must do more memory paintings like this.

EDM 173 - From Memory; 3x3" watercolor